by Sol Stein
Just then Henry heard the car swing off the highway. It spun around toward where they were all standing and came to a noisy stop on the gravel. Henry couldn’t believe his luck. It was a California State Highway Patrol car.
The trooper got out of the car.
“Thank heaven,” Margaret said.
The trooper looked at the trusties and then at them. The trusties all nodded at the trooper, as if in recognition. Their leader said, “This is Mr. and Mrs. Brown. They were trying to leave Cliffhaven.”
Henry stretched his arms out to the trooper. “They’re keeping more than a hundred people prisoner up there! Please radio for help.”
The trooper strode over to Henry.
Henry dropped his arms to his sides.
“All right,” the leader of the trusties said to Henry and Margaret, “come along.”
“What do you mean?” Henry said. “This policeman can help us all get away.”
“You,” the trooper said to Henry. “You do what they say, kike.”
PART 2
10
Rupert Fowler was born on his family farm in Oklahoma in time to be twenty-four in 1931. He was a broad-shouldered, restless loner of a youth who knew more about cars than country doctors did about the human body. The farming folk thought him ingenious, called on him rather than the service station in town to patch up their ailing vehicles, paid him in a lot of compliments and some cash, which he turned over to his father after deducting a tithe for himself. His father, an embittered man, told Rupert they were a farm family not a car-fixing family, and Rupert should stop wasting time on contraptions that got you from home to another place it probably wasn’t worth going to.
When cantankerous Mr. Morton refused to pay Rupert promptly for a tune-up on a Model T that Rupert had nursed through every sickness an old car is prone to, Rupert decided that the car was more his than Mr. Morton’s. In it he fled the family farm with one bundle of clothes and enough scrimped cash to keep him in vittles and gasoline until he reached the Los Angeles area.
He found the city bewildering—too many streets to get lost on, and if you were friendly to people you approached, they’d walk away fast as if you were crazy. The second day there a policeman looked at his license plate when he parked and asked him where he was from. Rupert said, “I’m from Oklahoma, sir, ain’t that what the plate says?” The policeman said, “You a wise guy?” Rupert said he hadn’t intended any impoliteness, but decided that he’d better head out of the city before he landed in the hoosegow with a lot of spicks. He was short of gas and eating money by this time, so he tried something he had imagined a time or two. He drove along late in the evening till he saw a fairly well dressed short man walking by himself. Rupert pulled up to the curb, got out, and walking around the car to the now frightened pedestrian, asked the stranger if he could borrow five dollars.
In those days five dollars was a fortune, but when the stranger looked up at Rupert’s formidable bulk, which exuded a sense of physical power, he decided not to refuse but to bargain. Rupert, who didn’t want to land in the hoosegow for beating someone up any more than he wanted to be locked up for possession of a stolen car, settled for three dollars and headed north on Highway 1. The three dollars was down to a few nickels and dimes before he found himself driving up to the gas station in the Big Sur area, contemplating what would be his first holdup. The trouble was he didn’t have a gun or even a knife, but he had the good sense to find a stick alongside the road that in his hands would have impressed just about anyone.
The gas-station lights were still on, but when he pulled up at the pump, no one came. He honked just as though he was a customer. Nothing. He didn’t have a clue as to the distance to the next gas station. With a near-empty tank he didn’t want to get stuck on the mountain road at night. Someone might decide to hold him up and, in anger at his not having any money, beat the living shit out of him.
And so Rupert decided to venture into the ramshackle building thirty feet in back of the pumps. The front room, a kind of office for the gas station, had a road-map rack and three pyramided stacks, each with a different grade of oil, a desk, a chair, and some ancient posters. Cautiously, he decided to explore the rest of the house, saying “hellooo” as he entered each room. He didn’t want anyone letting a shotgun blast go at him before asking questions.
He found the man in the back bedroom, a fat fellow in his sixties, wearing coveralls and slumped not on the bed but against it. The man’s face was red, covered in perspiration, and his breaths were coming real hard. Rupert thought the man looked afraid, so he put his stick down. It turned out the man wasn’t afraid of Rupert but of dying. As Rupert leaned close to him, the man whispered “heart trouble” and “get the doctor.” After a bit Rupert figured out that what the man was now telling him was that on the wall near the pay phone there was a card with emergency numbers, and one of them was Dr. Brooks’.
Rupert explained he didn’t have a nickel for the phone. Actually, though he still had nickels and dimes in his pocket, he’d be damned if he’d use one of his and chance not getting paid back. The old man, sick as he was, looked incredulous that someone would be out on the highway with no money, but he had to take the risk and told Rupert where the cash box was. When Rupert found it, he observed that it contained more money than he had ever seen in one place in his life, maybe seventy or eighty dollars in bills, and lots of quarters, nickels, and dimes. He took one nickel and called the doctor.
The doctor wanted to know who was calling, and Rupert said, “Name’s Fowler. Just came by and saw the station deserted. This fellow’s real sick with heart trouble.”
The doctor must have known about previous episodes of illness because he said, “Mr. Fowler, you stay right there, I’ll be down quick as I can. It’s seventeen miles.”
Rupert was real sorry he’d given the doctor his name. That was just dumb, ’cause he could have filled his car with gas, taken the money in the cash box, and gone off into the night. Just then he heard a cry from the bedroom, more like an animal’s than a man’s, and when he ran back to the bedroom, he saw that the old man was clutching his chest as if someone was beating on it with a jackhammer. Instinct told Rupert to lower the man to the floor from his propped-up position. He took the pillow off the bed and put it under the man’s head. In the bathroom he found a grease-marked towel and used a clean corner of it to mop the man’s face. In a little, the pain seemed to ease, and Rupert went off to effect the compromise he had made with his conscience, which was to fill his car’s gas tank from the pump and to take ten dollars from the cash box, figuring by the time anybody got around to counting it he’d be long gone.
When he checked the man after a while, he seemed resting comfortably, sound asleep, with the barest wheeze in his breathing. Rupert wished the doctor would get there so he could leave. While he waited, he adjusted his previous compromise and took another ten dollars from the cash box as well as a handful of change. It wouldn’t be missed any more than the first ten he had taken. He stashed the box away just in time as a car in not much better shape than his own pulled up outside.
Dr. Brooks shook Rupert’s hand, thanked him for the neighborly call real quick, and hurried back to his patient. Rupert wondered whether he should stay out of the bedroom or go in, finally decided to go in and when he did, the doctor, who was bent over the man on the floor, lifted his head, slipped his stethoscope out of his ears and around his neck, and said, “’Fraid he’s dead.”
“What was his name?” Rupert asked.
“McDonald,” the doctor said.
The doctor and Rupert sat in the living room for a while to tie things up. The doctor said he’d have the body removed by the undertaker the next day. He made out a death certificate and gave it to Rupert. “Can you stay.”
Since Rupert had nowhere pressing to go despite his new wealth, he decided to spend the night in the living room, though he told the doctor he sure didn’t relish the idea of the body in the next room. “What about kin?
” he asked the doctor.
The doctor looked at Rupert for quite a bit before he said, “I guess there’s no harm in you knowing. McDonald was…” He hesitated, wondering whether the twenty-four-year-old hayseed would get his meaning. “McDonald was queer. His friend who lived here died more’n ten years back. Occasionally he’d get some man to stay here for a day or two since, but not since his first attack two years ago. He’s got no kin.”
For the first time Rupert began to feel that the Lord might be telling him something—like that the rest of the cash box might be his one way or t’other.
As it turned out, when cars pulled up the next morning, they weren’t the undertaker’s but people asking for service, and Rupert thought he might as well pump the gas and take the money. He’d taken in fourteen dollars and change by the time the undertaker showed. He wouldn’t remove the body until Rupert had agreed to sign a piece of paper showing that the cost of burial would come to one hundred and ten dollars total, and that he would pay ten dollars now and ten dollars a week until it was paid off. Rupert took the ten from his pocket because he didn’t want the undertaker to see where the stash was. He signed because he figured he’d be miles and miles away when the next payment was due.
In the meantime, he pumped gas, took in cash, listened to the sympathy of locals when they learned old McDonald had died. They assumed he was a relative. Rupert decided he would depart as soon as the gas ran out. But before that happened, one morning the oil company truck pulled up and started making its delivery before he came out of the john.
“Where’s McDonald?” the oil company man asked.
“Dead,” Rupert said.
“You one of his, er, friends?”
If Rupert had had his stick handy, he might have clubbed the man first and thought second. The man saw his anger and was quick to retract when Rupert told him what had happened. The driver knew that whenever a privately owned station changed hands, the vultures from the other oil companies would descend and he’d be in danger of losing the account, so he suggested he and Rupert have a talk, which they did, the outcome of which was that Rupert stayed on as if he owned the place. The contents of the cash box was his. But so was whatever the difference between taxes and the cost of the gas and what he took in. And with no gas station within five miles, there was no worry about customers. In fact, he’d had a chance to see the daily activity and figured he might net himself, now that he knew the costs, more than fifty dollars a week, which is a lot more than anybody paid for the labor of an ex-farmer in 1931.
Not long afterward Rupert Fowler was visited one evening by a sixteen-year-old girl with black hair and beautiful eyes, who had walked barefoot to the station from wherever she lived up in the hills and offered to fuck or suck him for two dollars cash. Rupert, whose sexual companionship since leaving Oklahoma had consisted of his right hand, hung the “Closed” sign around the pump and took her into the back room, where afterward the girl, Cindy by name, demanded four dollars on the grounds that he had availed himself of both of her offered services. He didn’t quarrel too hard because he was already anticipating the next time, and, thinking of himself as a businessman now, negotiated a settlement for three dollars even. The following month Rupert, tired of the few dishes he knew how to cook, bored evenings and especially Saturday nights, figured it would be cheaper than paying Cindy three or four times a week to marry her legal so she could cook and clean and keep him company as well as satisfy his sexual requirements.
Two years later, little Joe Fowler was born, and by the time Joe Fowler took a bride, the two men had built several additions onto the original house and opened a general store to sell groceries along with gas. Moreover, Joe was as mechanically inclined as his father, and they were now fixing cars as well as pumping gas. Between them they had figured out six good ways of disabling a car while the owner was in the men’s room so that a repair became a necessity.
Frank Fowler was born in 1960, nearly thirty years after his grandfather had taken possession of the McDonald place; they were now considered an old family in the sparsely populated Big Sur area. It was said that old Rupert Fowler, now in his seventies, treasured two things most: His original cash box and being a grandfather to Frank.
*
They were a strange sight around the dinner table, that Fowler family, the men on one side, the women on the other, and the youngest, Frank, at the head of the table. Grandfather Rupert would have preferred to sit at the head as he had when his family was young. But the leadership of the clan had clearly devolved upon Father Joe, and to avoid a crisis that might have sent Joe with his quick temper looking for another roof, not sharing expenses anymore, Grandfather Rupert some years ago had decided that he and Joe should sit “on the men’s side” of the table, and the women sit facing them, each in front of her man.
And so it was that Cindy of the three-dollar compromise, now in her mid-sixties, sat opposite Rupert, urging him to eat the Spanish rice at least if gnawing at the chicken leg hurt because of his new dentures. Opposite Father Joe sat Matilda, her auburn hair pulled back in a tight bun, not loose and long and flowing as it had been when she had claimed a pregnancy to seal their relationship, although young Frank was not born until five years after they were married. In the hospital, Joe, who used to like a joke in those days, stroked Matilda’s hair and said that baby Frank’s was the longest pregnancy in the history of California. Matilda, who quickly became the smartest in the Fowler clan, gave Joe a look that Joe took to mean she would deny her body to him even after the doctor said it was okay if he didn’t stop wisecracking.
Young Frank was spoiled by his grandfather and encouraged by his mother. Now that he was in his last year of high school, Matilda wanted him to do what she wished she had done—learn something at a state college that would take him away from the gas pumps. Frank worked at the station after school to earn pocket money for dates and to buy spare parts for the Chevy. The car was nearly as old as he was, kept up with wax and buffing and fixing so that it looked showroom-new. Matilda didn’t want him to get used to fixing cars and pumping gas into a third generation.
Matilda asked Frank why he’d come to the dinner table with a long face.
“I called Clete,” he said, “I invited him to have dinner with us.”
“You shoulda asked first.”
“I did ask,” Frank said.
“That was a month ago,” his mother said.
“I been asking him ever since,” Frank said.
“You should make friends with people your own age. Clete’s too much older than you,” his mother said.
Father Joe said, “Your mother’s right.” He brushed the paper napkin across his mouth. “Clete knows you’re just sucking up to him to get a job up there. He ain’t no fool.”
“He said they hired new people from time to time,” Frank protested.
Grandmother Cindy chimed in, “What you want to work in that Jew resort for anyhow?”
“It ain’t just a resort,” Frank said, watching their expression to see if they knew what he knew.
“You just mind your business, son,” Joe said.
Just then there was the unmistakable honking of a horn from outside—first once, then three times in a row, insistent.
Rupert said to Frank, “You forgit to put the closed sign up?”
“I put both of ’em up,” Frank said. “I never forgit.”
*
Outside Frank saw the young man, dressed up Los Angeles style, standing beside his Mercedes. How did a young punk like that get to earn a car only rich people could afford?
“We’re closed,” Frank said.
“I saw the lights inside,” the young man said. “I figured someone was around.”
“We’re eatin’ dinner,” Frank said and turned to go in.
The young man followed Frank. “I’m sorry. I’ve been on the road from L.A. all day and didn’t check the gas gauge. I’m near empty. This is a helluva road to get stuck on.”
“You ca
n’t follow me into the house,” Frank said.
“I’ll give you five bucks over what the pump says if you’ll fill it.”
Frank turned to look at the young man’s desperate face. He liked to see people scared like that. Owning a Mercedes was no protection against running out of gas if you’re an idiot. The guy was actually peeling off a five-dollar bill and holding it out to Frank. The hand holding the five-dollar bill looked like it was manicured. Jesus, these Los Angeles people were something.
Frank took the bill. “You fill it,” he said to the young man, pointing at the gas pump.
“I don’t know how.”
He seemed embarrassed.
The Mercedes took nearly twenty gallons.
When Frank looked up, his father was standing at the door. “Everything okay?”
“Okay, Dad. Be back in a minute.”
The young man handed Frank an American Express card. “I hope that’s okay. Any motels coming up on this road?”
“Where you headed for?”
“Carmel.”
Frank looked at the name on the charge card: Jacob Fetterman. He shoulda guessed.
“Gotta check your name in the credit book,” Frank said. “Be a minute.”
Inside everyone looked up from the table. “He gave me five bucks extra to pump him some gas.”
They watched Frank head for the phone. He dialed a number he knew from memory. “Can I speak to Clete?”
After a moment, Frank said, “I’m sure he’ll talk to me even if he’s very busy. Tell him it’s Frank down at the gas station.”
It seemed to take forever. Finally the woman who’d answered the phone said, “Just a minute.”
“Please, hurry,” Frank said.
Then he heard Clete, breathless, saying, “What’s up, kid?”
“Oh hi, Clete,” Frank said. “I’ve got another one for you down at the gas station. Jacob Fetterman. Want me to send him up or can you come down for him?”
11
